Atlas Computing updates: starting the second half of 2024
Evan Miyazono
Hello Atlas community,
Here’s our a quick update (since our last update in April):
Project updates
Most exciting: We’ve soft-launched this report of AI-powered tools that would dramatically scale the efficacy of formal methods practitioners. We loved working with Shaowei Lin at the Topos Institute, and appreciate the financial support from Protocol Labs and the Survival and Flourishing fund. The next obvious step is…
Prototyping: We set up a new contract with Topos so Daniel and Shaowei can build some prototypes from the roadmap for the remainder of the year.
Goal-setting: We've set Q3 OKRs (and updated annual OKRs). We’re deliberating updating our Gantt chart vs more streamlined ways to anchor annual+quarterly goals to weekly goals.
Growth: Mishaal Lahkani joined us on July 1 to accelerate our operations, communications, and events, and Bogdan Stanciu will start as our product lead on August 1 to make sure we’re building the right tools to solve pain points for real users.
New Directions: We can’t put IAEA inspectors on every atom of U235, but we could do the analog for GPUs? We’ve also onboarded Mehmet Sencan to spend 3 months prototyping Hardware Enabled Governors to show the answer is yes. If you’re a funder, engineer, or researcher interested in accelerating this direction, please email he...@atlascomputing.org
Travel updates
Where we’ve been:
Evan recently presented at Edge Esmeralda’s Field Building week, joined the annual CHAI Asilomar workshop, and presented to the Guaranteed Safe AI monthly virtual seminar. We’ve started collecting talks from Atlas Computing in this YouTube playlist.
Upcoming events: catch us in person or let us know if we should meet anyone
Engage more
Opportunities to work with us:
We've got Researcher roles listed on our Jobs page. We’re in discussions about the possibility of a larger grant that might result in us hiring a few researchers and developers, so please do reach out if you (or someone you know) might be interested.
As mentioned above, our first blogpost is a great index of the various channels you can use to follow our content. And you can always email me.
Anyway, thanks for reading!
- Evan
p.s. What Evan’s reading…
- Sandworm by Andy Greenberg made me really want to prioritize using AI to advance formal methods for cybersecurity. In case you thought cyberattacks on civilian physical infrastructure were theoretical, you should read this book, or at least this wikipedia article
- Relentless by Tim Gower helps you lean into your inner workaholic. If you watched Billions, the book reads like an unpacking of the philosophy and perspective of a real-life Wendy Rhodes.
- I’m currently halfway through Talent by Tyler Cowen and Daniel Gross and also A Philosophy of Software Design by John Osterhout (this one’s an Amazon link; there’s also an easy-to-find pdf). So far I’m loving them both and have recommended each twice.